Celebrating the Women of Rocketship California
Maricela Guerrero, Executive Director, Rocketship California | March 7, 2025
March is Women’s History Month, a time to celebrate the strength, resilience, and leadership of women throughout history and within our own communities. Tomorrow, on International Women’s Day, we recognize…
Education Reform
Milwaukee Parents Organize to Increase Funding for Charter Schools
April 5, 2023
This week over 50 Rocketship families from both Rocketship Southside Community Prep and Rocketship Transformation Prep in Milwaukee attended the Wisconsin Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee Public Hearing on State Budget Revisions. Our Rocketship Families joined over 200 parents and families from choice schools across the city who are organizing together to advocate for equalizing school funding across all education sectors in the state. Our Milwaukee choice schools only receive 60% of what traditional public schools receive to fund each student’s education and families are demanding that funding be equalized in this year’s budget cycle! Two of our very own Rocketship…
Finding My Voice, My Power, and My Path
by Lety Gomez, Senior Education Organizer, Rocketship Texas | March 2, 2022
*This post originally appeared in CharterFolk Growing up in East San Jose, low expectations were the norm for many of us. My freshman year in high school, I was struggling in science. One day, I learned about a Latino student group planning a field trip to a local college. I went to my teacher to get a permission slip signed, but when my white, male science teacher saw my permission slip, he didn’t sign it. He looked down at me and said, “why do you want to go on this field trip, it’s not like you are going to college?”…
Celebrating HBCUs With My Black Students
By Corey Lewis | September 23, 2021
“I want to go to an HBCU because I’m Black and these schools are run by Black people like me.” That’s what Brooke Fairley, a 5th grader, told me recently. College readiness has become the go-to buzzword in K-12 education. Schools across the country emphasize and talk about college readiness curriculum, and how it is important for kids to graduate college-ready by high school so they succeed in their postsecondary education and beyond. While many of the usual suspects are discussed in these conversations with students and families (local state schools, Ivy League schools, private schools), there rarely is enough…
The Opportunity of Choice
by Juan Mateos, Director of Schools | August 6, 2021
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” I remember coming across that quote in one of my first years as a teacher and thinking it perfectly encapsulated the untapped talent and potential of communities that had been traditionally underserved by entire school systems. Communities like my own. I grew up in Oxnard, California, where I saw too many of my own classmates tyrannized by the unjust destiny of demographics and low expectations. When I was…
Alan Borsuk: Districts using federal pandemic funds wisely may see more payoff in future
by Alan Borsuk, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | July 23, 2021
This article originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on July 23, 2021 It’s the opportunity of a lifetime. It won’t really accomplish anything. Both opinions are widely held as schools across the country plan what to do with a huge wave of federal funding intended to boost both students and schools as a result of the pandemic. “This is an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of children,” Keith Posley, superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, said during a Marquette Law School program posted online July 21 on how the money will be used. Posley added, “Our children deserve these funds and even…
